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Stealing Beauty

Interview

Scandals are rocking America’s biggest art museums right now. It seems that the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts may own a lot of precious items with dubious backgrounds — vases and statues looted from archeological sites and smuggled into the U.S. The governments of Italy and Greece are crying foul, pressing court cases that implicate tomb robbers alongside disgraced curators. Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum, talks with Kurt about the fallout.